Review: Creative Sound Blaster Recon3D

Overview

A dedicated sound card in the current PC hardware landscape needs to be capable of all kinds of stunts to justify its existence.

Does Creative's Sound Blaster Recon3D, its new £90 external sound card, have a deep enough bag of tricks to succeed?


It's the world's first quad-core sound processor, which gives it the power to pull off impressive feats such as separate mic audio and in-game sound steams, and apply separate effects – including compression, surround and noise cancelling – to each stream.

It's best friends with THX TruStudio, works with PC, Mac, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and sports a 'Scout Mode' button, which amplifies sound cues in-game to highlight nearby enemies.


There was a time when Creative and other PC audio peripheral specialists made most of their dough from internal sound card sales, but advances in onboard sound chips quickly pushed aside internal PCI cards such as Creative's classic Audigy 2 ZS (a veritable metropolis of capacitors) to the realms of fringe peripherals.


Built-in motherboard HD audio chips such as those from VIA and Realtek, plus Creative's X-Fi range, have swallowed the gap in audio fidelity and processing performance that used to exist between PCI sound cards and onboard sound to the point that few would consider shelling out extra cash on sound hardware over other performance-enhancing components.


As the Southbridge chips on both Intel and AMD chipsets and CPUs themselves become more powerful, we get much less of a performance hit, since the silicon is crunching the numbers faster and more efficiently to decode digital audio to analogue so that your speakers can made sense of it.

This decoding used to eat up frames per second, but modern CPUs and Southbridge chips aren't troubled by integrated X-Fi 7.1 audio.

So the gap between integrated audio and kit such as Creative's Recon3D needs to be noticeable, useful and sizeable for the latter to appeal. Let's see how it performs.

The real breakthrough tech here is SoundCore 3D, the world's first quad-core dedicated sound processor.

You can expect to see this chip feature on high-end motherboards as an integrated sound solution as well as powering the Recon3D.

Four cores are advantageous because they can handle simultaneous digital signals and crunch away at them with HD audio codecs much more quickly and efficiently than a single processor – just like AMD and Intel's multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs with video encoding.


Long story short, you don't need to fret about losing frames per second to voice and sound processing. The Recon3D's got that covered. It probably has that covered without breaking a sweat in fact, which is why Creative has thrown a generous heap of functionality at it.


As we mentioned, the Recon3D is full to the slick black brim with Dolby THX TruStudio Pro features. The most useful for gamers will be Pro Surround and Pro Dialog Plus.

The former creates a 360-degree soundscape, with sounds panning horizontally and vertically around you. Rather than cram its headsets full of drivers, Creative has opted for the digital approach, interpolating sounds as they travel from one point to another. In practice, this is one of the Recon3D's most effective and enjoyable features.

It genuinely tricks your ears into hearing sounds way behind or above you and from some distance away. The intensity of this effect can be tweaked in the software layer.


Pro Dialog Plus is all about clearing up noisy voice communication and compressing incoming voice comm streams, so that you don't jump out of your skin when a French teenager starts babbling at you in Team Fortress 2.

Equally, the Recon3D lets you clean up your own outgoing mic signal by compressing it, applying noise cancellation or even using the effects software to make you sound like a little girl. Nothing creepy about that, right?


Then there's Scout Mode. Hit this button and the Recon3D creates a bubble of amplified sound around you in-game, the theory being you're less likely to get backstabbed if your enemies' sound cues are deafening. We had mixed results with this, with some games faring better than others.


Console owners can save profiles they've created on PC and apply them to their little gaming boxes too, and the optical cable setup means it's a stress-free experience hooking it up to any device.

Verdict

The Recon3D offers great gaming sound and voice comm tweaking on PC and consoles, with some nice THX effects to play with. It is expensive for what it offers, though.

We liked

It's a feature-filled, high quality product, and versatile too. However, the best thing about it is that Creative is bundling the Recon3D with its wireless Tactic3D Omega headset. That's a quality set of cans, with great sound reproduction and beefy but not overcooked bass levels. The headset's worth £180 on its own, but paired with the Recon3D, the price tag's £209.

That's still well in the realms of enthusiast ware, but a much more enticing prospect than buying the Recon3D alone. If you're going to buy a headset that costs more than the console you'll be using it with, an extra £20 for a powerful sound card with some nice gaming features ain't too shabby.

The excellent surround effect also makes the Recon3D (with the headset, of course) a good choice for movies.

We disliked

Our biggest concern is that as a standalone £90 purchase, we're not sure gamers will be that enamoured with it. It's one for enthusiasts certainly (though not audiophiles), and however carefully you tweak your settings in the software suite, there's still one important variable: your speakers. It's your headset or desktop speakers that have the final say over sound quality.

On these grounds, we find it hard to recommend the Recon3D alone, because it doesn't magically turn bad speakers good, and if you have a basic set of speakers or cheap headset, this isn't the gear for you.

Also, despite the Recon3D's versatility and functionality, don't think this is your one-stop audio solution. Sure, it's great across different platforms, but geared very much toward gaming.

Verdict

If you're looking for a solid all-rounder that works with PCs, Macs and consoles, this is for you.

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